THE ORTHO ROOMS

The everyday world of the domestic landscape provides the subject matter of The Ortho Rooms. Taking its name from the popular Ortho Books for home and garden care, this series of works blurrs perceptual distinctions between painting, photography and constructed reality. Set behind lenses, these foreshortened spaces occupy the hidden architecture of the wall, offering the viewer an encompassing and magical view of the mundane – a backyard overgrown with dandelions, a kitchen linoleum floor pierced by the leg of a stool, a downspout clogged with dead leaves.
Each consists of a meticulously constructed diorama installed whitin the hidden architecture of the wall and viewed through a circular window of glass lenses. Seemingly captured and brought back to the gallery enshrined not on the walls, as with a painting, but literally whithin them- these scenes, when made available for scrutiny, reveal themselves as the fictive imaginings they really are. The viewer is drawn into a seemingly idyllic landscape at once determinate and infinite, natural and contrived, prosaic and otherworldly. Reality has been de- familiarized, the uncanny has supplanted the commonplace.
Magic has long served to capture human imagination by seeming to make possibile the impossible, and by turning one reality into another. Similarly, a kind of pseudoscience or homespun natural phenomena characterizes Patricks work whose subjects are typically at odds with an increasingly anxious and paranoid world. In their manic attempt at achieving the impossible, it is only in their futile attempt at transcending their reality that they succeed. In the end, the gesture serves to tell a story about the impossible journey, rather than the destination itself.